The honest summary
| Vultr | DigitalOcean | Hetzner | Linode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cities we sell | 30 | 9 | 6 | 18 |
| Browser console | yes | no | yes | no |
| On-demand backups | yes | no | no | no |
| IP rotation | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Windows | yes | no | no | no |
| Best at | coverage and features | predictability | price per spec | network quality |
Every one of them gives you a real instance with NVMe storage, a dedicated IPv4 and full root. None of them is bad.
Vultr: the widest map and the most features
Thirty of our cities, and the only backend with Windows and on-demand snapshots. If you want a specific unusual city, it is probably here.
The region picker shows the plans each city offers, so what you choose is what deploys.
DigitalOcean: predictable, and that is the point
Nine cities, no console in our panel, no on-demand backups. In exchange it is the most consistently boring of the four, which for infrastructure is a compliment, deploys behave the same way today as last month, and the API rarely surprises.
Worth knowing: the plan range stops at Pro (no Beast or larger), GPU sizes are on Vultr and Linode rather than here, and its image list is narrower than the others. No Debian, for instance, because they dropped the versions our catalog maps to.
Hetzner: more machine for the money
Six cities, three in Europe. In Europe the specs at each tier are noticeably more generous than the other three, because their wholesale cost is lower, on the Hetzner backend a given plan simply gets you a larger machine.
One thing to know: outside Europe their cost is several times higher, so Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore carry their own price, shown in the region list.
Linode: quiet and well-connected
Eighteen cities and an Akamai backbone behind them, which shows up as consistently good routing rather than as a number on a page.
The trade is the thinnest feature set of the four here: no browser console, no on-demand backups, no IP rotation. A lost root password is not a problem, you can set a new one from the panel. A broken SSH setup is: with no console, a firewall rule that shuts port 22 leaves you nothing to log in through. Leave SSH alone and you will probably never care; lock yourself out, and you will.
How to actually choose
Start with the city. If your users or your exchange or your team are in one place, that is the decision, and it usually narrows the four to one or two.
Then check what you need from the panel. Windows means Vultr, on Standard or larger. Snapshots on demand mean Vultr. A browser console means Vultr or Hetzner. Reverse DNS rules out DigitalOcean, and an IP swap rules out Linode. Everything else is available everywhere.
Then stop. For a bot, a VPN, a small site or a build runner, the remaining differences are not worth the time to research. Deploy on whichever is available in your city and move on.
What is the same everywhere
Price, mostly: a plan costs the same whichever backend runs it, with two exceptions. Linode is a few dollars more on Starter and Standard, and a few locations where wholesale cost is far higher carry their own price. Both are shown before you pick, and the pricing page lists every plan side by side.
Also the account: one email, one prepaid balance, hourly billing on all four. And the parts that matter when something goes wrong: the same abuse process, the same support, the same person reading the ticket.